©SAINT Mxxxxxx Reopens the Time Loop: “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” Joins GEEKS RULE for FW26 2nd Drop

Makoto Konno’s bicycle crash gets a vintage-wash reboot as ©SAINT Mxxxxxx and GEEKS RULE turn to Mamoru Hosoda’s 2006 anime for their July 13 triple collision.

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• The Drop at a Glance
• Why “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”
• GEEKS RULE’s Ongoing Mission
• ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s Design DNA
• How This Fits the FW26 Season Arc
• Where and When to Buy
• The Bigger Picture

On July 13, ©SAINT Mxxxxxx opens its FW26 2nd Delivery with a triple collaboration built around Mamoru Hosoda’s beloved 2006 anime “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (時をかける少女, Toki o Kakeru Shōjo), produced in partnership with GEEKS RULE, the Tokyo-based project that reworks graphic tees around cult anime, game, and film properties. It arrives exactly one week after the brand’s 1st Delivery, which paired the label with the same “serial experiments lain” and GEEKS RULE for a release timed to that series’ 1998 broadcast anniversary. Where the 1st drop leaned into the glitchy, monochrome dread of “lain,” the 2nd drop pivots toward something warmer and more nostalgic: a coming-of-age film about a teenage girl, a walnut-shaped time machine, and the ache of watching summer end.

Full pricing and the complete item breakdown for the 2nd drop have not yet been published by ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s official channels as of this writing, so specifics below on individual SKUs should be treated as provisional pending the brand’s own release notes closer to July 13.

Oversized white graphic T-shirt pairs anime-inspired artwork with a relaxed streetwear silhouette, blending nostalgic Japanese visuals with minimalist back detailing.

why

Released theatrically in Japan on July 15, 2006, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” was directed by Mamoru Hosoda, written by Satoko Okudera, and produced by Madhouse. The film serves as a loose sequel to Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1967 novel of the same name, following the same basic premise but with new characters and story. The protagonist, Makoto Konno, is a fairly ordinary high schooler who stumbles into the ability to leap backward through time, courtesy of her aunt Kazuko Yoshiyama, who was the lead of the original novel. What begins as a convenient way to redo bad exam scores and awkward conversations curdles into something heavier once Makoto realizes her small fixes are rewriting other people’s lives too. Wikipedia

The film had a modest theatrical run, taking in roughly ¥300 million against limited advertising, before word of mouth pushed distributor Kadokawa Herald Pictures to expand its release across Japan and submit it for international festival consideration. It went on to win the Japan Academy Film Prize for Animation of the Year and has remained one of the most rewatched entries in Hosoda’s filmography, alongside “Summer Wars” — itself a prior GEEKS RULE x ©SAINT Mxxxxxx collaboration back in FW24. That earlier release suggests this is less a one-off pairing than the continuation of an ongoing relationship between the two labels and the Hosoda/Madhouse catalogue specifically. Wikipedia

The choice also tracks with a release-date coincidence GEEKS RULE has leaned into before: the “serial experiments lain” 1st drop landed on the date that anime originally began airing, and July sits close to the film’s own July 15, 2006 Japanese theatrical debut, making the 2nd drop’s July 13 date a plausible echo of that same anniversary-driven release logic, even though this has not been explicitly confirmed in the collection’s own copy at time of writing.

mission

GEEKS RULE positions itself as a project dedicated to carrying anime, game, and film culture forward through apparel, reworking iconic frames and key art from beloved titles into wearable graphics rather than straightforward reproductions. Its back catalogue reads like a survey of otaku canon: past collaborations have pulled from “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” “Summer Wars,” Santa Inoue’s “Neighbor No. 13” manga under his SANTASTIC! label, “HUNTER×HUNTER,” “The King of Fighters ’95,” and “Patlabor,” most of them filtered through ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s aging and distressing techniques. The FW26 1st Drop’s “serial experiments lain” pairing continued that pattern, with the source anime’s disorienting, static-laced visual identity reconstructed into new graphics by ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s in-house design team rather than lifted wholesale.

Turning next to “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” gives GEEKS RULE a tonal counterpoint within the same season: instead of “lain’s” digital unease, the studio gets to work with Hosoda and Madhouse’s warmer, hand-drawn suburban Tokyo, the walnut motif tied to Makoto’s time leaps, and a color palette built around long summer afternoons rather than server-room blues. That contrast between the 1st and 2nd drops — cyberpunk dread versus coming-of-age wistfulness — gives the FW26 season an anime through-line without repeating the same visual mood twice in a row.

 

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©SAINT Mxxxxxx was founded in 2020 by designer Yuta Hosokawa, best known for his upcycled-materials label READYMADE, alongside Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist Cali Thornhill DeWitt, whose past work includes merchandise for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo tour. The brand’s signature is a deliberately aged, hand-distressed finish applied across cotton-jersey tees, meant to mimic decades of wear the moment an item leaves the store — cracked prints, faded graphics, single-stitch construction borrowed from genuine vintage tee-making. That craft-forward approach to reproduction is precisely what makes ©SAINT Mxxxxxx a fit for licensed anime collaborations: rather than simply slapping a frame from the source material onto a blank tee, the brand’s process is built to make new graphics look like they’ve already lived a life, which suits a story as concerned with memory and the passage of time as “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.”

The 1st Drop’s “serial experiments lain” tees were shot by RK, the photographer who has documented ©SAINT Mxxxxxx since its earliest collections, with creative D modeling the pieces — a visual pairing the brand has used consistently enough that it’s reasonable to expect continuity into the 2nd Drop’s imagery, though this has not yet been confirmed for the July 13 release specifically.

how

FW26 marks ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s first autumn/winter delivery cycle for 2026, following a spring/summer season that ran through at least ten numbered drops and folded in collaborators ranging from A BATHING APE and BerBerJin to NEW ERA and HTC / Hollywood Trading Company, alongside music-driven pieces referencing The Stone Roses and Aerosmith. The 1st Drop opened FW26 with the “serial experiments lain” x GEEKS RULE triple collaboration on July 6, alongside standalone seasonal pieces — new graphic tees, caps, and socks built around the brand’s signature vintage processing. Positioning “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” as the very next release, just a week later, signals that ©SAINT Mxxxxxx intends to keep GEEKS RULE’s anime programming as a recurring spine of the season rather than a single seasonal event, mirroring how music and film licenses have anchored past deliveries.

It’s also worth noting the timing relative to the source material itself: 2026 doesn’t mark a round-number anniversary for the film’s 2006 release, so the July 13 date likely owes more to ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s own delivery calendar and GEEKS RULE’s release rhythm than to any studio-driven anniversary campaign — another detail pending confirmation once the brand’s own release materials go live.

huh

The 2nd Drop is expected to follow the same release cadence ©SAINT Mxxxxxx used for its 1st Delivery: online sales opening at 10:00 JST through the brand’s authorized e-commerce stockists, with physical retail typically following an hour later at 11:00 JST. Domestic authorized retailers for prior ©SAINT Mxxxxxx drops have included stores such as DIVERSE, FIGURE, MARK, and select Rakuten Ichiba storefronts, some of which have run early online reservations ahead of general sale for past collections. Given the pattern from the 1st Drop, some early access or reservation windows for select 2nd Drop pieces may open in the days before July 13, though exact retailer participation for this specific release has not yet been finalized publicly.

International buyers have historically been able to source past ©SAINT Mxxxxxx x GEEKS RULE pieces through resale platforms once domestic stock sells through, including GOAT and SNKRDUNK, both of which have carried previous Evangelion and “serial experiments lain” collaboration tees at markups over Japanese retail.

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Either or not the anniversary timing is deliberate, pairing “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” with ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s distressing techniques is a fairly pointed piece of curation. Hosoda’s film is, at its core, about the impossibility of holding onto a moment exactly as it was — Makoto’s time leaps let her redo scenes, but never quite recapture them unchanged. A ©SAINT Mxxxxxx tee’s whole design premise is manufacturing that same sense of a moment already passed, complete with the cracks and fading a garment would only earn through years of wear. It’s a small but coherent piece of concept matching from GEEKS RULE, following a similar logic that made the “lain” pairing work the week before: the source material and the brand’s craft technique are pointing at the same idea from different directions.

For enthused readers tracking ©SAINT Mxxxxxx’s collide slate, the two-week opening to FW26 — glitch-anime dread giving way to summer-afternoon nostalgia — is a useful early signal for where the rest of the season’s GEEKS RULE programming might go next.